Ensure schools are for teaching, not preaching

Sir,—John R. Nicoll (Letters, August 11) is being economical with the truth about removal of forced worship from schools.

He says it would deny the individual his own personal salvation, but the individual can still derive this, should he or she so choose, from the church, mosque, synagogue or temple.

Britain’s Hindus, for example, praised last month by communities minister Ruth Kelly as a model of integration in the UK, still manage to achieve their brand of personal salvation without a single, state-sponsored, Hindu faith school in the UK, so what’s the problem for Christians and Muslims?

Religionists, whether Muslim, Christian, Jew or whatever, want to use schools to indoctrinate fertile young minds with what they believe is the moral code of their preferred supernatural deity, but which is really nothing more than the myth, superstition and prejudice of primitive tribespeople.

We can see how these superstitions and prejudices are eventually given full airing with the current situation in the Middle East, and the concomitant propaganda war that sees Muslim, Christian and Jew assert the certainty of their respective positions with the unshakeable belief that their personal god is on their side, with each praying harder than ever for their personal god to deliver victory over the other.

If we are to stop this nonsense in future generations, we owe it to our children to ensure that our schools are for teaching, not preaching.

Gave wrong impression

Sir,—As one of many conservation minded anglers I was rather alarmed by the unfortunate choice of headline attached to your angling correspondent’s weekly column recently—Around 400 fish taken on Tay.

This gives the impression to the well-intentioned, but generally ill-informed, public (including the various ‘anti brigades’), that 400 of these wonderful beasts were killed in one week at a time when most sporting and conservation minded anglers and riparian owners are returning most, if not all, of their fish to the river in order to achieve their reproductive ‘goal’ thus ensuring the sustainability of stocks for future generations.

As a Tay angler (and I am sure that I echo the sentiments of many other like-minded Tay anglers), I would like to avoid the type of blanket ban or compulsory catch and release legislation already imposed on rivers such as the Dee where all fish caught must be returned to the river.

I believe that the headline, and content of the report, fails to acknowledge this small but extremely important (both politically and ecologically) piece of information.

Who wants this system?

Sir,—Yesterday you reported FETA saying they are ahead of other British bridges in dealing with cable corrosion problem, and that “high standards have been made possible with revenue generated by the £1 toll”.

The possibility of a cable corrosion problem on the Forth and similar British bridges was identified at least eight years ago.

All these bridges are tolled, but it seems to have made no difference to the time taken to deal with this problem.

In any case, the public expect all road bridges to be safe, whether tolled or not, particularly as they are already paying £50 billion a year in taxes.

Would it not be better if all Scotland’s major road bridges came under the remit of the Scottish Executive who are already directly responsible for 3500 kilometres of roads and road bridges?

Who apart from FETA wants a system where an organisation looks after just one bridge and part of their effort goes into collecting tolls?

Flawed research

Sir,—Maureen Moore of ASH is right to question the research which was carried out by Enstrom and Kabat quoted by Dr Templeton. They received funding from a tobacco industry group linked to co-ordinated attempts to confuse the public about the dangers of second hand smoke.

The British Medical Journal of July 2003 showed one of the biggest flaws in the research was that Enstrom and Kabat could not identify a comparison group of unexposed persons.

Their analysis essentially compared non-smokers married to a smoking spouse to non-smokers with other sources of environmental tobacco smoke exposure.

I note Mr Templeton uses the title doctor. Is he a medical doctor or a PhD in another field trying to cloud the issue even further by using the title?

We should be grateful

Sir,—The row over security delays at airports reminds me of a remark by the then Tory transport minister Paul Channon after the Lockerbie bombing.

Asked if baggage checks should not have been more thorough, Mr Channon said he would not give the terrorists “the satisfaction of inconveniencing passengers”.

But one could argue that the alternative gives terrorists the satisfaction of blowing aircraft out of the sky—the ultimate “inconvenience” for passengers.

We should be grateful security is now being given priority over passenger convenience.

As for compensation for airlines, they should have taken out insurance against delays due to security alerts.

An A4 poser for postboxes

Sir,—Now that the Royal Mail is charging us much more for sending A4-size letters, will they be expanding the slots in all their post-boxes so that you can actually post such letters without crushing them in half?